What’s Up Doc? is a mental map of New Galerie, an attempt to tear the walls of rue Borda limb from limb and reveal its internal organs. Behind the fog, the thick layer of grease, we invite you to touch the still burning trauma of its owners. We want to see the superstructure, the discursive conditions (bye) making this anomalous cradle possible. We want nothing less than to identify the rst show of psychological institutional criticism (Psycho Institutional Critique).
1816 was a year without summer. Following the eruption of the Tambora volcano, the world was ravaged by ash-laden winds. Disasters, wars and famines were the results of this long-repressed purulence. 1816 was in many ways a miserable year. It was during a particularly rainy July, following the successive loss of her children, that Mary Shelley created the character of Doctor Frankenstein. Perhaps the latter could have well sat down in a lounge chair that the Jacques Lacan on rue de Lille would not have rejected. Imperturbable, this creation of Olivier Mourgue, father of the padded steel chairs in 2001, A Space Odyssey, is the perfect seat for the Cassandras. Thwarted receptacle, short- winded grim reaper, it is dust on the chest of drawers. Virilio loved accidents and twilight time, John Hejduk suicidal buildings, Jean-Paul Getty Hadrian’s villa. As for us, we love Dora Budor. No more classes, no more God, no more subject matter, the trinity of metastasized tumors can continue. The body is worried, like Ted Pikul in eXistenZ. A ayed Hollywood character, a carbonized concretion of a “big drop”, For Harry (Mark Prent, 1984) is a cataleptic bastard in his formal evening tuxedo, the renegade post situ of Rodez’s asylum where Antonin Artaud was imprisoned. What is this face with patent bruises? “I’m very worried about my body.” Nearby, the closet is sealed, shutting out the muted sound of beating hearts, waving under its mandibles unresolved early childhood affairs. Department of Health and Human Services. What happened near the closet? Little children wander from hearth to hearth in rooms so vast that their footsteps echo in the bedroom of a prognathous Sandman. Again, no one is responsible for opening the box. Dr. Frankenstein, are you there under the paint of the hospitals?
Sugar in contact with the esh promotes the proliferation of bacteria. Even marked by the sacred seal of an exegesis, we rot with a disconcerting humility. Job would not have wanted anything to do with us. In the basement, a homonym (Henry) is placed on the throne smearing the gallery wall with all his arrogance. An anonymous vacuum cleaner and self-advocate, he is the passive witness of shattered bodies. Henry, a portrait of a serial killer. A troubled observer, he feigns pain. Careful preparation for mass shootings? Scouting out places? Tailing someone? Tribute Marches? The trilogy of glaciation. In the last room all the paper archives of Peter Sotos are displayed. Falaka. Reconstructing crimes, exploring the limits of voyeurism and exhibitionism, the salient and the hidden, the aesthetics of a secret door and solitary con nement, networking the stridencies of this program, ignoring ambulances are valueless missions. We do not believe in harmless gallery owners. The exhibition responds to simple questions with convoluted hypotheses, watered-down actions (from Pliny the Elder to Jil Sander), post-oedipal associations. Yes, it’s complicated, what’s up doc?

Galerie Jerome Pauchant is pleased to announce Steven Cox’s first solo exhibition with the gallery. Good Vibrations brings together a series of new paintings that further explore the stripe motif, a structural composition regularly investigated throughout Cox’s oeuvre.

She is holding an oval mirror. Her reflection is her tomb. Ivy has climbed up her arms, and across her whole dress. The only untouched area that remains is her back. Here, the skin appears as soft as a peach, pink and alive. The trial of the mirror is a cruel ricochet; one day the last rebound will come.

A woman is wrapped tightly in white bandages. The costume has become a cage, a prison. She is a mummy or perhaps a slave with her eyes closed. Above her, a swarm of butterflies fusses, as if they will take her away. She is flying, forgetting her body, life, and the earth. Her flight is motionless, and her escape is internal, spiritual. Maybe she has visions?

A dark-haired woman is dressed in black, like a large crow. Her gloves are made of chain mail and the nails iron claws. Her hair is in the air. She seems dangerous, like a creature out of fables.

A young man is wearing a long, grey skirt. The corset can barely contain his muscles. He is holding fans made of blades on fire, his eyes staring directly at his target.
Vee Speers’ characters are heroes, shamans and fighters who appear invincible. They seem to come straight out of madness, a circus, a poem, either from a distant past, or from the future. Maybe they come from a new mythology, from Mad Max or from a Tim Burton movie. The Australian artist grooms, dresses and masks her subjects. She also disguises colours. Just like those black & white movies that are colorized, she gives her portraits tints for which time leaves no trace. A necklace made of skulls and teeth, a pair of metallic wings, a horse head, wooden limbs, shears: she arms her gang, right on time, for the big battle. Trapped in these worlds where everything has fallen apart, they have no choice but to fight.

Vee Speers invents her own dystopia and speaks straightforwardly of our violence-infected era and barbaric wars. The concerns, the troubles and fears are like arrows that cross over those men and women who are but themselves. No fixed identities, no determined genders. In Speers’ world, the characters at once both manly and feminine, changing, transforming and fulfilling their dream to be free.

After all, it is what the artist is talking about: freedom. Even if the suns are cold, even if the party is over, even if fear is present, there is freedom. Indocility. With her Mohican hairstyle and conical breasts, she is immediately seen as a rebel. With her muddy puffed skirt, one can imagine the girl in the wild, taking up arms, never giving in. Despite the chains, despite the barriers: never give in.

This is maybe the end of a cycle; Vee Speers concludes a story which began ten years ago with children from The Birthday Party then six years later, with those same children in the midst of their adolescence (Bulletproof series).

Nick Mauss will present new mirrored panel works developed from his increasing interest in backdrops, mises-en-scène and modes of display responding to the site-specific of the gallery. Painted with either abstract gestural marks or loosely rendered figures, Mauss builds a tension between the intimate gesture of his drawing process and the potentiality of a scenic décor.

Mauss is currently developing a permanent public commission for the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, USA and will be part of the Triennale di Milano in Milan. He recently had a solo exhibition at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Portugal. Mauss’ work is part of the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Princeton Art Museum, USA and FRAC Champagne-Ardenne, Reims.

The Galerie Mitterrand is pleased to announce a new solo exhibition by Peter Kogler. For the occasion, the Austrian artist will present a visual and sound installation (sound by Franz Pomassl), as well as an ensemble of recent collages.

Peter Kogler is a pioneering artist in the field of computer-assisted creation. Employing cutting-edge technology, for the past thirty years the artist has made use of a series of recurring motifs, materialized in different forms: bi and tri-dimensional prints, sculpture, furniture, wallpaper, lighting fixtures, collages and other installations. Since the start of his career, his iconography has been made up of ants, brains, terrestrial globes, lightbulbs and wavy lines, and is a metaphor for networks, the constant stream of information and social ties.

For his new exhibition at the Galerie Mitterrand, Peter Kogler presents a visual and sound installation created in 2016 produced by and exhibited at the ERES Foundation in Munich the same year, and at K21 Düsseldorf in 2017. The artwork is a box measuring 230 x 270 cm, into which the visitor is invited to enter. In the inside, the walls, made up of LED screens and mirrors, endlessly reflect a computer-generated kaleidoscopic video animation. The visitor’s image is also reflected and is an integral part of this psychedelic and moving universe. This immersion into an abstract, hypnotic environment is characteristic of the video installations that Peter Kogler has developed since the early 2000s. Nevertheless, for the first time, Peter Kogler has designed a video installation that is technically not in situ and is therefore, not ephemeral. This time, it consists of a video work that is at once sculptural and subsequently moveable. This hybrid form might be considered a kind of Dream Machine of the 21st century.

An ensemble of collages created especially for the exhibition will also be on show. These works, conceived as ‘mood-boards’, are made up of images collected by the artist over the past thirty years. These have been assembled according to protocols fixed by the artist and combined with his personal iconography. They constitute a mental landscape of sorts, a window onto the creative process specific to Peter Kogler.

Peter Kogler was born in Innsbruck in 1959 and lives and works in Vienna (Austria). Peter Kogler has been the focus of numerous international exhibitions, including Documenta IX (1992) and X (1997) in Kassel, as well as representing Austria at the Venice Biennale (1995). He has enjoyed solo exhibitions in numerous institutions such as the MAMCO Geneva (2007), the MUMOK Vienna (2009), the Museu Colecção Berardo Lisbon (2009) and more recently at the MSU – Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb (2014), the Sigmund Freud Museum, Vienna (2015), and the ING Art Center, Brussels (2016).

I photographed Berlin Living Rooms in black and white because the Polaroid film I used does not exist anymore. Also, I see the city in black and white, in part due to its Expressionist past—especially in the movies from the thirties (Pabst, Joseph von Sternberg) and forties (Billy Wilder) —and because of photographs: from an early age I saw photographs of Eric Solomon; their black-and-white gritty political outlook made an indelible impression on me. I loved the Berlin of the Wall. For a photography artist, it was an extraordinary historical landscape to photograph. In fact, I did photograph it a lot, and had held related exhibitions in New York, Paris (FNAC), Strasburg, and Koln.

At first glance, Nicolas Boulard’s works seem part of a specific heritage, that of minimal art and conceptual art. The forms are geometric, circles, spheres, polyhedrons. The artist gives great importance to the void, to space, to time and geometry. However, in going closer to the works, the viewer perceives other information that comes from the living, the sentient world. Soil, cheese, water, wine are combined with strictly geometric forms. Nicolas Boulard takes samples from different landscapes to create improbable encounters. His entire approach functions in this way, through the encounter, the assembly of antipodes. The works then express a synthesis, a collision between minimal art, conceptual art, appropriationism, land art, dada, fluxism and surrealism. From Donald Judd to Hamish Fulton, by way of Jean Arp, Richard Long, Dan Flavin, Constantin Brancusi and Joseph Kosuth, he takes hold of forms and protocols to give them new translations.
Mobility gives rise to a relationship between his body, the place in which he finds himself and the plastic process that will give an account of a singular experience. The method encounters the sentient. Nicolas Boulard takes samples of water to givee an idea of his excursions and his drifts. He brought a sample of water from Lake Geneva back to his studio. The water is presented, as is, between two framed glass plates. As time passes and the weather changes, it evolves, microorganisms develop, condensation appears, an ecosystem is installed. Barely perceptible, the water forms a line, a symbolic horizon. The work constituted the first step of a series in which the artist applied himself to collecting water from the landscapes photographed by Hiroshi Sugimoto. Nicolas Boulard himself visits landscapes or sets up a cooperation network so that the water samples are sent to him. The original images are reduced to the essential. Water becomes a projection space. The same is true of the work formed by soil. On the wall, the diptych called Antipodes brings together two wood circles covered by soil, one ocher, the other a more reddish hue. By studying a map of the world, Nicolas Boulard established diametrically opposed zones. He then decided to work using soil found in the Cadix region in Spain, while the other sample came from Mount Roskill in Auckland, New Zealand. The two circles not only contain the unexpected encounter between these two zones, but also their geographies, their cultures, their landscapes and their histories. In this sense, he applies psycho-geography as Guy Debord defined it: “One measures the distances that effectively separate two areas of a city, and that have nothing in common with what an approximate vision of a plan could have one believe.”
The son of wine-growers, Nicolas Boulard is attached to the living, to landscapes, gestures and the senses. Through his works, he assembles territories thought of as contradictory, starting with the exhibition itself, since it has the same name as the pub next door to the Eva Meyer gallery, The Quiet Man. Guy Debord and Robert Filliou accompany him. If he initially wanted to link the gallery and the pub by means of a door, a secret passage, he decided to transform the gallery’s basement into an experimental space dedicated to the encounter, tasting, improvisation and exchange. An informal space open to drifts and possibilities.

The Musée des Arts Décoratifs is celebrating the 70th anniversary of the creation of the House of Dior. This lavish and comprehensive exhibition invites visitors on a voyage of discovery through the universe of the House of Dior’s founder and the illustrious couturiers who succeeded him: Yves Saint Laurent, Marc Bohan, Gianfranco Ferré, John Galliano, Raf Simons and, most recently, Maria Grazia Chiuri.

After dedicating many shows to the Milanese art scene of the 1960s – with exhibitions of the works of Lucio Fontana, Enrico Castellani, Dadamaino, Turi Simeti and Paolo Scheggi – Tornabuoni Art Paris inaugurates a second journey into Italian art, with the exhibition La Dolce Vita: Avant-Garde Artists in Post-War Rome.

La Dolce Vita refers to an historical period in Rome of the 1950s-1960s and specifically to new trends and lifestyle that became synonymous with Federico Fellini’s 1961 film, La Dolce Vita, a chef-d’oeuvre of Italian cinema.

In the 1950s, Rome was recovering from the wounds of WWII. While this dark past was in the background, these were the years of the economic boom and rebuilding, that came with a strong desire to make the most of life and celebrate beauty after the horror of war and Fascism. At that time Rome also became a destination that attracted international intellectuals and artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.

From the remains of the war emerged a wave of change, the birth of a modern era, with the formation of new artistic movements that would make their mark on the 20th century. This exhibition explores the way the art that emerged in Rome at this time – the Forma 1 and Origine groups and Roman Pop – were inspired by the cultural panorama of those years to push the boundaries of painting in a way that still influences contemporary art today. La Dolce Vita pays tribute to and documents this historical moment in Italian art with a selection of 40 museum- quality works, many – including those by Alberto Burri, Carla Accardi and Piero Dorazio – created between the 1950s and 1960s, and others made in the years following La Dolce Vita, by artists such as Jannis Kounellis and Mario Ceroli, directly inspired by their experiences of the Post-War Roman art scene.

The first group of artists presented in the exhibition, named Forma 1, was founded in 1947 by Carla Accardi, Piero Dorazio and Giulio Turcato, among others. In their manifesto, published in the Forma 1 journal in April 1947, the artists claim to be “formalists and Marxists”, their ambition being to connect Marxist politics to abstract art. The group promoted a structural anti-realist, abstract art that gives importance to the form and the sign in their basic sense, excluding any symbolic or psychological representation in their work.

Carla Accardi, a researcher and experimenter, developed her own poetic painting style, at first based on interlocking geometric forms and later evolving into pseudo-calligraphic signs and informal improvisations with different materials, such as her colourful paintings on transparent plastic. Her work later influenced Arte Povera artists. Piero Dorazio and Giulio Turcato, painters of colour and light, attempted to express movement with their luminous textures. Dorazio in particular went against the tide of contemporary avant-gardes by questioning the role of colour and experimenting with all its possibilities, while Turcato in his work abolished the concepts of mass, volume and perspective. Forma 1 disbanded in 1951 but left a deep mark on 20th-century Italian Art.

The year 1951 also saw the birth of the Gruppo Origine of which Dorazio was also a member. Maintaining numerous contacts with American artists, such as Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, the group was founded by Alberto Burri, Giuseppe Capogrossi, Ettore Colla and Mario Ballocco. The Gruppo Origine considered abstract art to be “decorative” and instead sought to become the reference for non-figurative art, reducing colour to its simplest and most incisive expressive function, developing pure and elementary images.

During this period, Rome also benefitted from an intense dialogue with the USA through the strong influence of the language of American Pop Art. By the late 1950s, Italian Pop precursors emerged in Rome: Mimmo Rotella with his appropriation of street posters through layering, tearing and peeling; followed by the sculptures of Mario Ceroli. Italian Pop Art found its unity in the Roman group Scuola di Piazza del Popolo whose members included Tano Festa, Franco Angeli and Mario Schifano.

Roman Pop Art’s fertile experimentation with images and art differs from other contemporaneous Italian art scenes. Refusing to relinquish figuration, these artists developed their own artistic vocabulary, defined by cultural references to the past, art and its history, as can be seen in Tano Festa and his citations of Michelangelo, as well as in Mimmo Rotella’s collage-like works. These references to classical art also influenced the work of Pino Pascali and Renato Mambor.

In the creative setting of Post-War Rome, artists such as Mario Ceroli and Jannis Kounellis embarked on more radical experiments, creating sculptural forms and challenging traditional notions of artistic classification, materials and genre – ideas that later found fruition in Arte Povera.

As a tribute to Jannis Kounellis, who passed away last February, the final room of this exhibition will be dedicated to his monumental Untitled work from 1989, a 16-metre-long installation made of iron, lead, oil lamps and coal – materials typical of his Arte Povera work. One of Kounellis’ most impressive works, it concentrates and epitomises the different themes and creative elements of his work. Typically large-scale, the work fills the entirety of the room in which it is exhibited.
Another key aspect of this work is the relationship between man, the artist and nature. This installation is neither a painting, nor a sculpture ; the frontier where nature ends and the artist begins is difficult to trace. While Kounellis’ magnum opus embodies the ideas of Arte Povera, its experimental spirit was born in the cultural ferment of Post- War Rome.

For his fourth exhibition at the gallery, Andrew Lewis presents a set of seventeen oil paintings that compose a form of pictorial documentary-fiction around the major innovations of the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the field of knowledge and telecommunications.

Andrew Lewis anchors the starting point of his narration in the post industrial revolution era, which sees the culmination as well as the first contestations of the positive idea of technical progress. Focused primarily on the Victorian era - with a few exceptions such as the Parisian subway map (Bienvenue Bleuet, 2017) and the John Hancock Center, Chicago’s iconic skyscraper (Otis Platform, 2017) - through the strange encrypted and extremely documented portraits of their inventors, the artist portrays a series of technological innovations, their applications and evolutions over the following centuries. For example, the conversion of the Crystal Palace site, originally built to host the first world exhibition of 1851 and then converted into a television and radio transmitter; the Geissler tube (1857) and the Crooks tube (1870s) whose applications revolutionized science and new technologies; or John Logie Baird (1888-1946), an engineer known for having invented the first system for the broadcasting of television images.

In spite of their mysterious character, Andrew Lewis’s paintings are animated by a great educational concern. Education and entertainment are the keywords. Halfway between technical drawings and the 1980s educational animations, they work with images and keywords to assemble the pieces of a puzzle. This is the case of Sir Christopher Cockerell’s “portrait” (Sir Christopher Cam Cams, 2017), whose life is traced through images of his inventions (including the hovercraft) and his biographical references listed on a keyboard, recreating a kind of painterly epitaph. Free from any space/time limit, the works of Andrew Lewis are like time machines. More than forms of homage to famous characters or inventions, they come to display and make visible, by means (and with the limits) of painting, some historical moments of transition.

However, far from being hymns to progress, these canvases are painted in an aesthetic both old and futuristic. Rather than conveying nostalgia for an era or past glory they display an ambivalent feeling of admiration and muffled anxiety, allowing Andrew Lewis to retranscribe the erosion of blind belief in technical progress.

Sidival Fila was born in 1962 in the Brazilian state of Parana, Brazil. He studied art in Sao Paolo before moving to Europe in 1985. It was during a study trip to Italy that he rst chose to devote himself to religion, putting aside his work as an artist for a few years to become a priest.
While running the Franciscan monastery of San Bonaventura on Mount Palatine in Rome today, Sidival Fila has been working on an artistic activity for about ten years in his monastery, in a vast workshop overlooking the Roman Forum. e exhibition, organized with the complicity of art critic and exhibition curator Dominique Païni, brings together an exceptional collection of ten monochrome, pleated and sewn paintings. At the same time, the Church of Saint Eustache hosts a work by Sidival Fila which will be on display until the end of January 2018.

Praz-Delavallade is pleased to announce the fourth exhibition in Paris by New York and Berlin-based artist John Miller.

In this body of work, Miller presents five silkscreen paintings, ten coffee mugs, and a digital slide show, all of which refer to how people inhabit public spaces. He has drawn inspiration from Michel de Certeau’s essay “Walking in the City” from his acclaimed book, “The Practice of Everyday Life”, published in 1980.

The silkscreen paintings derive from drawings that Miller made based on photographs he has shot in dif- ferent locations such as Warsaw, Munich and Palma de Mallorca. Put simply, these are sketches of ordinary scenarios that one might find in many cities. The values in these paintings are very close so as to suggest mirages, hallucinations or after-images.

The center of the space will feature an arrangement of coffee cups. For these Miller photographed com- muters from overhead at the new PATH train station at the World Trade Center and had these printed on the cups. He chose this site for formal reasons: the floor of the station is white and thus clearly offsets the commuters as individual figures. Because he shot these images in rapid succession, one finds many of the same figures in different configurations from cup to cup.

In the third part of the show, Miller examines contemporary urban space via an eight-minute PowerPoint slideshow. It is essentially a short-form photo essay that blends together narrative, criticism, appropriation, and poetry. Many of the images are simply blank close-ups of street and sidewalk surfaces, edited in rapid succession. Intercut with these are fragmentary quotations about urban space. Certeau has observed that city can only exist if its ordinary inhabitants, seen as pedestrians, can appropriate and alter it in their own ways. Miller contrasts fragmentary citations from Certau with those from Erving Goffman, an influential American sociologist who viewed the social world as a theater of conflict and contestation. As the Power-Point unfolds, the impact of surveillance apparatuses and social control becomes ever more apparent.

Miller’s interest in public space began with the photo series “Clubs for America” (1992), which documents the sites of sex clubs in New York City that closed or were closed after the onset of the AIDS epidemic. This investigation led him to his ongoing photo project “The Middle of the Day” (1994 – present) which consists of images taken, between noon and 2 pm., the typical hours of a lunch break. The current exhibition extends Miller’s ongoing investigation of the daily realities of economics and social class, specifically by considering digital technology’s transformation of public space – through mobile phones in particular. It suggests that photography, rather than augmenting memory, may actually diminish it.

Born in Cleveland, USA in 1954, John Miller is an artist, critic, and musician, based in New York and Berlin, whose work has been exhibited in major museums and collections worldwide. Over the course of thirty years, Miller has produced a diverse body of work that, in addition to figuration, addresses language, valuation, social hierarchy and abjection. He has had solo exhibitions at ICA, Miami (US); Kunsthalle, Zurich (CH); Le Magasin - Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble (FR); Kunstverein, Hamburg (DE); Musée d’art moderne et Contemporain, Geneva (CH); MoMA PS1, New York (US); and Ludwig Museum, Cologne (DE) where he was awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Prize by the Society of Contemporary Arts in 2011. His work was selected for the 1985, 1991 Whitney Biennials, 2005 Lyon Biennial, as well as the 2010 Gwangju Biennale. Miller’s work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum, New York (US); MOCA, Los Angeles (US); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (US); the Museum Ludwig, Cologne (DE); Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (NL); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (US); Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami (US). John Miller is a Professor of Professional Practice in Barnard College’s Art History Department, and in Berlin.

The Centre Pompidou is presenting André Derain 1904 - 1914. La décennie radicale (The Radical Decade), which takes a fresh look at the work of this major 20th century artist, tracing the various stages of his career before the First World War, when he was involved in the most radical avant-garde movements. Some remarkable groups of work have been brought together for the exhibition: his 1905 summer pieces painted in Collioure; a series of London scenes, and his very large dance and bather compositions.

The art of André Derain has not been the focus of any major monographic exhibitions since the 1994 retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris – in other words, for over twenty years. This French painter played a crucial intellectual role in the emergence of two major avant-garde movements in the early 20th century: Fauvism and Cubism. Early on, he made a solitary return to realism, foreshadowing all the figurative movements of magic realism from the Ingrism of Picasso to the metaphysical painting of De Chirico and the New Objectivity of Germany. Derain’s daring, highly inventive pre-war work is fascinating. Derain, who was close to Maurice de Vlaminck and Henri Matisse, and then Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, engaged forcefully with Fauvism and Cubism, developing a powerful body of work up to the First World War. He experimented visually in many ways, tackling painting, drawing, xylography, sculpture, ceramics and film, and practised photography throughout his life, along side his painting.

The exhibition focuses on an exploration of Derain’s hitherto unexhibited archives – his photographs, collections of prints and artwork reproductions, writings and correspondence – and for the first time sheds considerable light on some of his most iconic works through strong visual counterpoints: the photographs he took and his atypical artistic references, including Epinal’s engravings, the Maori objects he copied at the British Museum in 1906, and the African sculptures in his collection. The exhibition presents around seventy paintings, a large number of works on paper (watercolours, drawings, sketchbooks and engravings), sculptures and some fifty photographs, as well as Maori and African sculptures and ceramics.

Louis Cane is one of the exponents of the last French avant-garde movements, the Supports/ Surfaces group founded in 1970. During the 1970’s, the artist analytically explored the manners of presenting the « picture », considered as combination of coloured frame/field. In space, he presented his research on free canvases, cut, folded, stapled, vaporised, as in the exemplary Sol/Mur series, through which he conducted a clear and conceptual reflection on the place of the passage.
His way of painting subsequently broadened out, throwing out, in other ways, questions about painting in the so-called post-modern era in which it was supposedly no longer possible for an artist to work « after » someone else.
Using resins on netting stretched over a metal frame, as in his Peinture(s) vraiment abstraite(s), the artist has since the late 1990’s revived the structuralist and analytical thinking of the Supports/Surfaces years, which is today being examined closely by the young American scene. And these works are indeed reminiscent of the different components of the picture/object: the colour, the frame, the structure of the stretcher and the canvas in the form of a metal covering. The translucent coloured resin and the mesh support, are transitory media. There is no pretence of depth, the coloured screen is no longer an illusionist space, and the window actually opens, beyond the depiction or presentation. The passage reveals the stretcher and the underlying space. The constitutive opacity of the picture is thus spurned. The applications of resin seem suspended over an evanescent plane and themselves are traversed by the light that reveals them, that projects and forms them into coloured shadows on the surrounding space. The resin layers, like colourful interfaces, open a reflection on the diaphanous, which literally lets one see through. Louis Cane writes elsewhere of these resins that they are « coloured air ».
In his Peinture(s) vraiment abstraite(s), the reddening surface is glazed with a translucent material and, like a lacquer, is the source of unpredictable flashes of light. Moreover, a network of small horizontal colourful touches encased in a transparent resin layer punctuate the surface of Peinture vraiment abstraite, like reflections on a watery surface. In the double meaning of the term, these paintings are surfaces of reflection. These surfaces that are both porous and reflective, are spaces of interval or mid-places, between two waters that put bind together the front, the inside and the outside. The water surface is the paradigm of this joint intersection and Louis Cane never ceases to make use of them, through coloured resins or the Nymphéas series begun in the late 1980’s. Of course the artist reveals an affiliation with Claude Monet, a painter revealing luminous events and the father of abstraction. « Abstract Painting is its element here: no narrative or figurative depiction, just the depiction of feelings and emotions contained on the surface of the picture », writes Louis Cane. Beyond any visual pleasures, lacquered with acid-coloured resins that seem still ductile, the Peintures vraiment abstraites also produce haptic or taste-based sensations. The artist also evokes in them the memory of jars of barley sugar. This is an aesthetic experience whose etymology reminds us that it is always a matter of sensations.

The Xippas gallery is pleased to present the first solo exhibition of Brazilian artist Waltercio Caldas, which will bring together works made in the recent years.

Waltercio Caldas, a major figure of Brazil’s contemporary art scene, started his artistic practice in the 1960s, a period marked by the Neo-Concrete movement. For five decades now, the process of perception and the relations between the gaze and reflection have been at the heart of his work, where extremely pure and almost minimalist forms coexist with a conceptual complexity. His sculptures are both present and immaterial and show not so much the objects but rather the space between these objects. As Guy Brett writes, “the minimum of physical material reveals the maximum latent spatial energy.”[1]

Waltercio Caldas’s sculptures outline objects whose very essence is left undefined. In Wings (2008), steel circles hung on the wall, like a kind of anchoring point, and linked together with cotton strings, create geometric shapes both simple and ephemeral. Through the setting up of only lines and points, this piece alludes to emptiness and silence. Its title itself, Wings, subliminally recalls air, which, in Caldas’s work, is associated with the space structuring the objects, and becomes a location for the projection of thought.

Caldas, who often uses only the contours of objects, as in Blue glasses (2012) where steel structures outline glasses without showing the physical objects, pushes the paradox between presence and absence – and between transparency and opacity – to its extreme. This paradox is reinforced through a play on mirrors, a recurrent technique in his work. Here again, the artist develops the idea of reflection without actually employing mirrors. In creating several planes where lines and objects replace the reflections of one another, the artist reveals a three-dimension mirror and materialises the idea of reflection, a process he considers as a “functional dismantling of the mirror.”[2] Thus Caldas goes beyond the duality between presence and absence, positive and negative, and manages to reach a paradoxical fusion between a tangible reality and thought.

Language plays a fundamental part in this process of constructing meaning. Because of this essential relation between names and objects, between what we see and what we read, the title becomes an integral part of Waltercio Caldas’s work. Language introduces a new approach, that of reading, and also confers another dimension to the word – its physical presence. For instance, in Not now (2014), words and steel rods create an inseparable ensemble, enter into a game of repetitions, reflections and transparency.

This use of language, both poetic and conceptual, also allows Caldas to introduce references to art history. The titles of his sculptures often allude to names of artists, such as Brancusi (2014), and trigger a reflection on the work of art itself, on the distance between art and art history.

Waltercio Caldas’s sculptures, while displaying a rare visual fineness and using such an economy of means, invite the viewers to experience his/her own reading of the work, somewhere between an immediate comprehension and an intellectual interpretation. In the same line as Umberto Eco, who, more than fifty years ago in The Open Work (1962), argued that the viewer was now part of the creation process of an art work, Caldas wants to involve his viewer in the experience of interpretation and opens multiple possibilities of meanings. What matters when approaching his work, is the precise and enigmatic moment of perception revealing the work as a process, an echo to phenomenological thought which argued that the object only exists in the eye of the viewer.

Waltercio Caldas was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1946, where he still lives and works.

His first solo exhibition took place at the Modern Art Museum of Rio de Janeiro in 1973 when he was only 27. Numerous museums and art institutions have dedicated exhibitions to his work since, including the Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, Netherlands (1992), the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Lisbon, Portugal (2008), the Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, United States (2013), the State Pinacotheca in São Paulo, Brazil (2013), etc.

He represented Brazil in the 47th Venice Biennale and took

part in the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. He also participated in the dOCUMENTA 9 in Kassel (1992) and in the 5th Mercosul Biennial (2005).

His works are included in major collections throughout the world: Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris, France), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, United States), the National Gallery of Art (Washington, United States), the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo and the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), among others.